He moved carefully between the trees. The sun was slowly coming up. With each moment, daylight grew brighter. It was a miracle he’d lived. Images of his family returned. Their bodies. Charlotte, Mom and Dad. Semaj. Dara—was she dead too? He didn’t know. But he remembered her dream. I must live, she’d said. Maybe she had. Even if she had—how would he meet her eyes when he was just a coward? When he’d simply run from it all.

  There was only one thing left to do: walk. Nothing else. Take one step, then another; keep to the half-shade; avoid the openings. The forest smelled of cool wood; the smoke from the fortress lay behind him like a nagging thought.

  Algar set his feet softly. First, he heard branches snapping—short, jittery cracks, as if something were ploughing blind through brambles. A deer burst from the birches so suddenly there was no time for thought. It carried its fear in its body. It came straight at him, blind to anything but escape.

  Algar didn’t even manage a full step back. Reflex did the work. Hips turned, shoulder dropped, the axe traced a short, crooked arc. A crack, a soft resistance, the animal’s breath leaving in a sound like a sigh. The deer missed him by a hair, described a half-circle, legs folding like a broken spring. Two bounds on, it stiffened its neck with senseless resolve and fell.

  For a heartbeat, he stood rooted. Only then did it reach him what he had done. He knelt by the animal. On the side by the shoulder, a dark stain spread. The blade had struck clean—but not clean enough. The deer still trembled, dragging short, helpless drafts of air.

  He finished it quickly, with a single motion. Blood flowed warm and steamy; the smell hit him in the face. He went at it with the axe—more or less where the best cuts should be.

  He chose a fire pit below a break in the ground, in a hollow where the wind ran even. He ringed a small circle of stones, the way Semaj had taught him. He stuffed it with dry needles, moss from a rotten trunk, and curls of birchbark.

  The world changed color—gold of flame, orange, a warm yellow. Smoke climbed in a thin plume. The forest answered in whispers. He heard nothing larger than a fox.

  He skewered the first strip of meat on a stick and held it over the fire so the fat dripped steadily without dousing the flame. The smell came at once—intense, heavy. His stomach whimpered like a pup.

  There was something shameful in that sound. Flame danced on the scrap of meat; the fat browned; the skin crackled. He waited for the color to turn from pink to gray. The thoughts didn’t come at once. First came warmth. His legs stopped shaking, his neck loosened, the tension that had sat in him since their door blew to splinters slid from his back. Mother. Father. Semaj. Charlotte. Names he didn’t speak, and yet he could taste them. Field air while they mowed. Fresh bread. The tale of Sir Renart, cut short by wailing. Punishment. Roar. Black fire in the beasts’ eyes. Charlotte’s head carried like a thing in a mouth.

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  He swallowed the meat. It tasted neither good nor bad. Shame settled on his shoulders without warning. It came like drizzle: nothing at first, then suddenly your skin is wet. Shame that he’d run. He held the meat over the flame again. Fat dripped like counted seconds. He remembered the hooded figure—those calm, lazy hand motions. Pointing directions like a finger across a map. The red signs pulsed to a rhythm that had gotten into his bones. The gods didn’t answer—but something else did: anger. Not the kind that flares and dies, but the kind that burns steady, deep—the kind that gives heat in frost. Anger at someone. At someone, not everything. At the hand that did this to them. Anger that could be walked like a road.

  Shame and anger sat side by side, surprisingly at peace. Shame, so he wouldn’t forget where he’d come from. Anger, so he’d have somewhere to go.

  “I’ll find the one responsible and mete out judgment,” he said, staring into the fire. The coals hissed briefly, like at the touch of a drop. For a heartbeat, there was something of a chuckle in it.

  Out of habit, he set aside a portion for the dog. Then he remembered it would no longer be needed. He ate—not greedily, not like a wolf, but like a man who knows he has to ration his strength. He hung the rest of the meat low over the coals for a gentler roast.

  He sat a while longer, listening. An owl called in the distance. In the brush by the stream, something rustled; something small swam the shallows and vanished in the reeds. The river wasn’t far; he could smell it, damp and cold. In the morning, he’d go to it, wash his hands and face. That much he could do.

  He lay on his side to the fire, his back to the trunk. He slid the axe between himself and the bark, the haft along his palm, the head snug at his hip. It let him feel he still held on to something—that the world wasn’t slipping entirely from his grasp.

  The coals dimmed by a hair. The fire blinked. When he closed his eyes, sleep didn’t come at once. First, he passed through the layer where everything he’d seen that night returned in a different order, a different logic. Only then did darkness come—not the black of the rift, but a human, ordinary darkness in which a person can lay down a body and make it stop remembering for a moment.

  The night passed without a single howl. That was new, and strange.

  Towards dawn, the chill crept under his shirt. He rolled, touched the axe’s haft, and felt a calm that had nothing to do with comfort—more with readiness.

  Several hefty chunks of meat were still roasting on the skewers. Anger burned quietly and steady, like good coal. Shame, heavy as a stone, lay beside it.

  Unexpectedly came a neigh and a few knocks of wood on stone, quite close by. Someone had survived.